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This is the General Game Design, Ideas and Discussion thread: - Use this thread to "Show off your Game-Related stuff (art, code, ACTUAL GAMES, music, whatever), Ask Questions about making games for fun/a living/etc, and anything else related to making games. DO NOT USE THIS THREAD TO START GOON PROJECTS, those threads would do better in YCS" The FAQ The White Dragon posted:you wanna be a one man army, you gotta learn or teach yourself how to do the work of an army. You wanna be an ideas guy, you gotta have the funds to hire that army to do the work for you. A: I don't know because I don't have one. Honestly, you probably won't get a job making games until you're a person who actually makes games. Start making games, talk to us about the stuff you're making, pump out whatever you can and enjoy yourself! Maybe one day someone will pay you to do it for them. Q: So how do I start making games? A: That's what this thread is about : the starting points. You'll need to be an ideas person, and then just find someone to do all the easy programming work for you and make your idea come alive. Don't worry about art and sound you don't need that poo poo. Really though, you're gonna need to work at it slowly. Ideas aren't too important when you're starting, just make try to make a Pong or Tetris. Pick a development environment (Goon recommendations can go here?) and read a few tutorials on game logic/theory online (See Resources below). You don't need to drop any money on anything to make your first game(s), but you'll need time and some basic math skills. Q: I just wanna tell people what to do and design games. A: That's okay, but that's something that really takes a lot of money. You'll be looking at paying wages to a small team of people; namely artists and programmers. I don't think I can really give much advice on being a video game producer. Q: I'm less interested in programming and more interested in graphics/sound. Can I do this? A: The "Higher Level" environments like Adobe Flash/whatever let you focus more on being a creative person, and less on arguing with your computer about mathematical outcomes. You can step above the metal and work with an existing game engine like Source and Unreal Engine where you'll be spending more of your time modelling and making maps if you'd like to take that approach (although the SDKs allow you to get down into the depths of the code as far as you're comfortable, too). There's lots of ways to approach this kind of preference, another goon can probably field this perspective a lot better than myself though (I make DOS games...). Q: Actually, I just wanna do all the programming, can I get someone else to do the pretty stuff and sounds? A: This is a pretty common position to be in around these parts. If you're fairly happy to throw together tech-demos and prototypes using beeps and boops with MSPainted sprites, but need help getting anything with polish, you'll probably be able to find some help around here. Lots of goons have artists and sound engineers they'll recommend, and you'll need to pay a little money to get someone to hand over original works for your game to use, but it's quite normal to have someone else handling the sights and sounds while you do the programmy stuff. Get busy making your prototypes and pre-alphas and build it in a way that you can drop graphics and sound in-and-out fairly easily, then talk to us about what you're after and (if you're comfortable) show us what you've made. We can usually recommend the right person for the job (goon or otherwise). Our very own goon Rupert Buttermilk is a go-to option for sound design and music in games if you need to get the job done. he even has a thread all about it! Q: If I make a game, can I sell it and make money? I want to make a living off this. A: You can certainly try! When you sell a game, you're either doing it "Direct" or via a 3rd party. Direct would usually be a paypal purchase from your own website, and you've probably built a little purchase system yourself. The big 3rd parties are Steam, Desura (I'm not familiar with desura personally), GoG.com, and a few others goons can probably think of. Getting your game onto a 3rd party site will usually take some kind of approval process, and the 3rd party will take a cut of your money. They'll also pay for all your bandwidth needs and take a huge chunk of your marketing worries away. Don't expect your first game to ever be in the top-5 on Steam, but you never know what might happen I guess. Q: I was thinking about posting my game here but what if someone steals my idea and makes millions and then I am sad? A: This is the internet, so don't post your idea and expect it to be protected in some way. You can't copyright an "idea" in any sense anyway. If you create something however, it is yours. If you write a story, draw a picture, make a sound, or produce software, that is yours and no one else can claim it as their own (legally). Your "idea" for a game where ten million players can all gently caress hooker bots isn't copywritten and I'm probably gonna steal it and make my own game with hooker bots and get rich from your lovely idea. If any other questions get asked fifteen times or more, I'll add them to this list. Resources https://programarcadegames.com (great tutorial series mnd found on reddit) https://boards.polycount.net (art) https://cgtalk.com (art) https://game-artist.net (art) https://gamedev.net (programming) https://gamasutra.com (game development) Other Threads about Games Gettin' Made Game Development Megathread | Game Jobs Megathread | Bi-Weekly Game Jam / Goon Games Get all up in that IRC There's a gamedevgoon IRC channel, its irc://irc.synirc.org/sagamedev. Get in. Goons Who Make Games to Some Degree (Just PM me to add yourself/change poo poo/correct my mistakes and assumptions) Try to follow your fellow goons on whatever social media sites you share in common with them. Re-tweet/share their (interesting) posts to your followers and help encourage their work to be seen. It's a community thing; get into it! ambushsabre - Andrew Nissen Twitter: @ambushsabre Website: http://setsandsettings.com/ Apple Jax Website: http://www.icarusproudbottom.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Icarus-Proudbottom-Starship-Captain/414267391979354 Beelzebub - Josh Hass / ZombieMariachis Website: http://www.zombiemariachis.com/ Website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/omega-shooter/ Bert of the Forest - Nick Lives Website: http://interactivedeli.webs.com/ Twitter: @slicknicklives BizarroAzrael - Alexander Maw Twitter: @xjmaw Website: http://escapefromthewatertemple.wordpress.com/ blinkeve1826 - Melanie Ehrlich, voiceover actress Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ListenToMelanieVO Website: http://www.listentomelanie.com the chaos engine - Folmer Kelly Twitter: @folmerkelly Website: http://setsandsettings.com/ Diplomaticus - Dan Rosenthal Twitter: @swatjester Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/gamepolitics Website: http://www.gamepolitics.com/ DuFfY - Ben Taylor / Kleaveland Twitter: @bensgames Website: http://bensgames.net Tumblr: http://sunnyjum.tumblr.com eeenmachine - NimbleBit Twitter: @eeen and @nimbledave Website: http://www.nimblebit.com/ floofyscorp Twitter: @floofyscorp Freelancepolice - Freelance Police Twitter: @freelancep Furret Basket - Fiona B / Stompy Blondie Twitter: @fionasarah Website: http://stompyblondie.com/ Hazamuth - Arttu Laurila Website: https://www.10tons.com/ HelixFox - Kyle Rodgers Twitter: @kylerodgers Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/helixfoxgames Website: http://www.helixfox.com/ Hughlander - Doug Warren g+: https://plus.google.com/111966056249378537062/posts Jo Website: http://www.josephcatrambone.com/ Juc66 - Tangental Games Inc. Twitter: @TangentalGames Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tangental-Games-Inc/104486019670182 Website: http://www.tangentalgames.com korusan - JT Starr Productions Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JTStarrProductions Kunzelman Twitter: @ckunzelman Website: http://thiscageisworms.com/ LordAndrew: Twitter: @Lordovos Website: http://www.lordovos.com/ Lucid Dream: Twitter: @playsignsoflife Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playsignsoflife Website: http://www.playsignsoflife.com/ Nition - Bill Borman / Moment Studio Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bestmomentstudio Twitter: @nition Website: http://www.momentstudio.co.nz/ Nuggan - EA Tiburon Twitter: @JRMendel Oddx Twitter: @seemo Faceboo: https://www.facebook.com/koopmode Website: http://www.ko-opmode.com Pfhreak Twitter: @pfhreak Pi Mu Rho - Neale Roberts / Dirigible Games Twitter: @dirigiblegames Website: http://dreadnaughts.co.uk/ g+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/106180581116801609590/posts Polo-Rican Website: http://www.icarusproudbottom.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Icarus-Proudbottom-Starship-Captain/414267391979354 The Radix - Glen Forrester Twitter: @theradix Website: http://klikscene.com/ Red Mike - Michael Red Twitter: @MikeRedhorse Website: http://codingden.net RhysD - Rhys Davies Twitter: @rhysdee Website: http://www.rhysd.com/ Shalinor - Glass Bottom Games Twitter: @glassbottommeg Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/glassbottomgames Website: http://www.glassbottomgames.com/ Shindragon - Alejandro Ibarra / Lucasarts g+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103466951460959887025/posts SuckerFreeGames Website: http://suckerfreegames.com Svampson - Patrik Riström Twitter: @svampson Tumblr: http://svampson.se/ Thumbquat Twitter: @thumbquat Toastline Website: http://colourfire.nfshost.com/ Ol Uncle Anime - Zoe Quinn Twitter: @ZoeQuinnzel Website: http://www.beesgo.biz/ Orzo - Eric Wheeler Twitter: @ericswheeler Website: http://superobelisk.blogspot.com/ Xibanya - Manuela Malasaña Twitter: @ManuelaXibanya Website: http://teamdogpit.com/ Cool Links from narby (from the last thread) narby posted:LINK EXPLOSION KRILLIN IN THE NAME posted:Here's a few links with royalty free sound effect libraries - good starting points if you don't have an audio person. Mug fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Apr 17, 2023 |
# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 06:57 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:30 |
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Goons let me know if there's anything radical to change in the OP, especially the FAQ - It's all from my perspective which is fairly 1-sided. Also let me know if I included your personal website/name inappropriately or incorrectly. Technologies / Engines / SDKs / Stuff You Might Use To Make A Game Here's a few words from people who've spent time with different things, hopefully to help you choose the tools you might use to make a game. This list is a bit of an information dump at the moment while I whittle away at the information goons can give me and their experiences. Feel free to contribute information or opinions! ambushsabre posted:If you want to program and get started really quickly, you can use Flixel (actionscript 3) to make flash games. If you want to do point-n-click, I reccomend Stencyl (flixel gui edition). I wish this link would get pasted at the top of every page and in the OP: http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/ It's seriously useful for a developer at any level, because it simply lists resources you might not know about. Take a look! Unity Unity is a very flexible cross-platform game engine with a really powerful development kit. Anything made in Unity will usually compile to run on Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android. The newest version seems to also play nice with Linux. I haven't personally played with Unity myself, but here's a few words from goons about it. WMain00 posted:Unity Source SDK The Source SDK is the freely available software development kit and engine for creating Source games (The Half-Life 2 engine and beyond). You just need a steam account to download it and get started playing. WMain00 had a few words in regards to Hammer, the mapping tool for Source: WMain00 posted:Advantages Game Maker From what I understand, Game Maker is the new "Click and Play" where you don't really need to get deep into the programmy stuff and can just play around with a simple interface to make your games start working. There's room to get deeper into the coding side of things if you want to, though. CloseFriend posted:I used to use Game Maker heavily. If you're willing to get your feet wet with programming, it's capable of a surprising amount in 2D. You can make pretty much anything 2D with enough patience. I know it has particle effects and some very limited 3D capabilities. I haven't used it since I accidentally waited too long for a free upgrade (a bugfix, really) and they said I had to rebuy the whole program just for a bugfix. Construct CloseFriend posted:Construct has most of the same 2D capabilities as Game Maker. From what I've used of it (not much… yet), it feels more intuitive than Game Maker, but its community is much smaller as it hasn't been around for as long. ScirraTom posted:Tom here from Scirra! Just saying thank you for listing Construct 2 We're a 2 man company based in London (it's me and my brother running it) and things are going well! We get really excited seeing Construct becoming a bit more recognisable Panda3D PyGame (Python): 2D SDL engine SFML (C/C++/.Net/Python): 2D multimedia API Irrlicht (C++): 2D/3D engine Multimedia Fusion 2 RhysD posted:Advantages Ren'Py Visual Novel engine. Mug fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Sep 18, 2012 |
# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 06:58 |
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CloseFriend posted:Would it benefit the OP to list good free/cheap game-maker programs that do most of the programming leg-work for you? Off the top of my head, I can think of Game Maker, Construct, and Unity. You're drat right it would. I've never used Unity or Game Maker, but I assume Unity is a 3D cross platform game engine with SDK, and Game Maker is light click-and-play, right?
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# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 07:44 |
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Okay, I'm gonna make the 2nd post all about "technologies" with a bit of a writeup on each one for someone who's never used them before and needs to make a decision about whether it's right for them. Anyone wanna throw some words together about Unity, Multimedia Fusion, Game Maker, Unreal Engine, Source, whatever people use Flash/Actionscript for and anything else?
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# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 09:57 |
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Is Source Film Maker related to making games? I thought it just rendered to video?
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# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 11:41 |
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I've never touched it so I wouldn't know. What's Hammer SDK? Do you mean the Source SDK? I thought Hammer was the map editor for Source. Is that not the case anymore? I haven't played with anything Source before, Hammer was the Half-life 1 map editor I remember.
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# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 11:46 |
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What are you using to make that, HelixFox? Is it going to be a kind of actiony run-and-jump RPG?
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# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 14:43 |
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I thought about that while doing my current music license description, but in this design I am only using full tracks from start to end, no loops or anything so it became a non issue. I had to make it clear that I'll be distributing DRM free copies of his music in ogg format within the game folder, so we had to factor that in. Now we need to talk about Sound effects. I'm keen on having my music dude do the sound too. Should be a beautiful result.
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# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 15:11 |
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Kunzelman posted:Just hopping in to say that I have made a game in Construct called Smash the Patriarchy! It is a platformer where you rescue feminist ghosts and platform your way out of oppression. Added you to the OP, do you have facebook or twitter you'd like people to follow, too?
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 00:30 |
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seiken posted:Hey cool, thanks for the new thread. I picked up a matches and a torch, pressing W was to Wear stuff, though, and it kept saying I can't wear that. I was to Wield, but the wield menu didn't seem to respond to any key presses. After a while i keyboard mashed and my torch caught fire but I don't know how I did it. Then the bats came.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 00:38 |
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seiken posted:Oh, capital W is different from small w, w is wear, W is wield The lighting/line of sight is clearly beautiful.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 00:46 |
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The White Dragon posted:you wanna be a one man army, you gotta learn or teach yourself how to do the work of an army. You wanna be an ideas guy, you gotta have the funds to hire that army to do the work for you. Gonna work this into the OP in some way because that's a genuine bunch of words.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 09:11 |
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loving hell, trying to draw a black border around a not-square window had me loving stumped for ages. Stupid poo poo like this sometimes adds another 12 hours onto my development time. Now I've gotta make "Close" buttons. Point-and-click menu interfaces are a horrible thing to develop.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 09:58 |
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Red Mike posted:Not square as in...trapezoidal or whatever, or just rectangular? They're rectangular but they have little tabs along the top with various text in them.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 10:20 |
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I just sent my music guy a list of songs I want to "Sound like" and a few words of guidance for the original music tracks for my game. I'm really excited to hear what he comes back with.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 12:46 |
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ScirraTom posted:Tom here from Scirra! Just saying thank you for listing Construct 2 We're a 2 man company based in London (it's me and my brother running it) and things are going well! We get really excited seeing Construct becoming a bit more recognisable Thanks for stopping in! I've added your words to the OP. Feel free to add anything else you'd like to say about Contruct to help a new person interested in game development feel comfortable choosing it to make a start with.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 23:51 |
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Spritesheet Sunday! (thats a thing now) Drew these bad-boys and implemented them today. Un/Locking of doors is now an actual in-game ability, not just a function in the level editor. Drawing a padlock in the isometric perspective took a lot of thinking and failed attempts before I got it looking right.
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# ¿ Sep 16, 2012 05:18 |
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tl;dr: This post isn't helpful at all I just wanted to post my story about progamming and jobs. All my school-aged friends/family are at the point now where they're deciding what to do about their further education; a few of them want to make video games for a living. I don't associate "making games" or "programming" with school at all. I learned to program and basic game design theory from those little cartoony "How to program your MICRO" books by Usborne. I still have them all on my book shelf. I never studied anything to do with computers at school and I didn't go to uni, either. I'm Australian and I completed my VCE which is "High school"; you do VCE at ages 17 and 18 which is school-year 11 and 12. Your results in VCE work towards determining what you can do in University. In my VCE, I studied marketing, visual communication (the graphical side of marketing), and a heap of music classes so I could bum around playing bass guitar for my final school years and drawing pictures. Then my exams came around and I ate a bunch of ecstacy, got really average results (on the exams, not the drugs) and decided I didn't wanna to go Uni ever. I got a job as a tech-support jockey at an internet provider that was going out of business really slowly. Between phone calls, I made a 2D game engine for DOS on my laptop (this was like 2005, not actually the days of DOS). That company went out of business and now I'm a full time software engineer at another Internet provider (mostly PHP stuff) and I'm working on my first actual game. I don't really know anything about getting a "job" making games, but I know about getting a job doing programming, and I know about programming to make games; I can't imagine doing both at the same time. There's a thread in the OP about Game Industry Jobs where you'd probably get way better info. Mug fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Sep 17, 2012 |
# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 08:51 |
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How do you re-create that hardware "Mouse" feel where its just super responsive in your game engines? I have to draw the mouse cursor as part of my graphics routines when in full-screen because you can't see the windows cursor. I've got the mouse calculating position rrrright before the wait-for-v-retrace happens then drawing directly to the back-buffer as the last thing it does but it still doesn't feel as real as the windows cursor. I've tried drawing directly to the video buffer or at other parts of the rendering loop but I just can't get it right. edit: I think I'm going to implement what I call the "Cannon Fodder mouse", where the mouse is an in-game entity that is affected by camera motion. I hope it's not too disorienting, but it seemed to work fine in cannon fodder; I've just never played anything that used that kind of movement since. Mug fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Sep 17, 2012 |
# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 11:51 |
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Shalinor posted:What's your framerate? Doing a mouse that feels good, without 60fps, is quite hard. I can get hardware cursor straight from Windows when I'm in Windowed mode, but when I hit full screen, I have to handle everything myself. I don't know how to do a hardware call to pull the hardware mouse into my environment. You can really tell this is the first time I've developed for anything >DOS sometimes. I can't believe how easy it is to use sound now. edit: I can pull 60fps, but I think the hardware mouse usually polls and updates at like 120hz or more so it just doesn't quite cut it. Mug fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Sep 17, 2012 |
# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 14:54 |
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Maybe 60fps is really just fine and I'm expecting too much. I'm totally rewriting the mouse behaviour at the moment anyway so I'll see how it ends up once it's all re-done. edit: Hey, about to hit 5000 lines of code. Smashing. Mug fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Sep 17, 2012 |
# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 15:05 |
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I mentioned it earlier in the old thread by I wanted to get some opinions here in the new thread. If an indie game came out with minimum system requirements of Core 2 Duo 2.5ghz 2GB RAM GeForce 8600GT Would you say that's unreasonable for a 2D game? Would you prefer a drop in video card requirements to Intel Integrated? mnd posted:Howdy fellow game makers, etc., I've gone and added this to the OP after just a really quick look at it. Looks like a great resource for learning game development theory.
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 03:58 |
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Juc66 posted:The 8600 is pretty awful and most folks have better cards than that. I know things are different now, but I don't wanna alienate the person with a fairly old laptop who is happy to just play little 2D games. I have a MacBook with a GMA950 in it. I'll boot camp it and do some QA on it.
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 04:18 |
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My concern is that the game is almost "unplayable (35 fps)" on the following specs, which I consider to still be a fairly okay PC. Core Due (not Core 2 Duo) 2.0ghz 2GB RAM GeForce 7900GTX I consider this to be a pretty powerful machine, but the difference between the Core Duo 2.0 and the Core 2 Duo 2.6 seems to be the big deciding factor. The 7900GTX is way more powerful that then 8600GT, but it has no effect. I think if you have a decent CPU, the video card really doesn't matter at all and I'll probably be able to target Intel cards.
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 05:06 |
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Orzo posted:What kind of performance analysis have you done? Surely there is room for optimization if you're having framerate issues. Your game is pretty, but it doesn't look like it should be pushing the hardware that much. What language is it in again? The engine's got a ton of performance analysis tools in it; in some of my screenshots you can see a little graph in the bottom left of the screen. The game is slowed down by two things, the scaler that zooms everything to 2x all the time is handled by SDL and I can't touch it at all to make it go any faster. The next thing that slows it down is the zBuffer population, which pushes every "movable" entity onto the zbuffer for rendering every frame in order (it doesnt push blocks and walls because they never move). These two things are the biggest performance hitters. Oddx posted:Yeah if also depends on if the game is supposed to be super accessible gameplay wise, and if so it should also follow for the hardware too. I have a macbook air that I do most of my iOS dev on with intel integrated graphics and it does pretty okay for that, and I use it for most of my casual gaming. My target audience probably has the hardware to run the game anyway, but I still feel bad saying "You need a computer made in the past 3 years to play this game that looks like it was made 10 years ago."
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 05:46 |
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I'm not too bad at performance analysis. Sometimes I'll dedicated an evening (5 hours) to running through my OptiSlots (which is my performance analysis nodes) and picking one to just work at like crazy to make it lower. I'm getting there slowly but calculating vision cones and pathfinding are some big hitters. At the end of the day, maybe you're right and I should just accept that a Core 2 Duo is a reasonable expectation.
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 06:03 |
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Because my game runs on isometric tiles with a global turn clock, its already got path finding only happening when people bump into a wall/person or when they're told to move to a new location that they can't actually see. All AI only happens when a creatures decision cool-down (related to their footstep speed) hits 0. I try to make things only happen when needed, and things like vision cones are fairly inaccurate on a per-pixel level because it ends up as huge tiles in the end anyway. Honestly, it's that 2x screen scaler that's the killer. The framerate jumps to 180fps when you turn it off.
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 07:37 |
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Juc66 posted:The only things I can think of are to rescale everything once, keep it from memory and use those rescaled items when you need to draw. The "rescale once" is what I considered. My graphics buffers would double in size, but performance would improve MASSIVELY. The game would just require a much larger chunk of RAM, and I think my engine might hit a limit on memory usage if I try to do it. I've hit limits trying other things along the way with map size.
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 08:13 |
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Do you guys get pissed off if a windowed game captures your mouse pointer? I really like it because it stops you from accidentally clicking outside the window, but I wanna make sure it's not some kind of no-no. Consider also that Alt-tab gives the mouse back to windows. edit: holy gently caress I just spent like 4 hours building a relative mouse movement system and it turns out you can just loving do it using the windows API. Well, that's good I guess, my hand made one was polling pretty slowly. edit: holy poo poo that works way loving better. That's a huge load off my mind. I was really worried as to how I was gonna make relative mouse movement work with my pathetic poll speed. The windows API just blows all that poo poo away. Mug fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Sep 18, 2012 |
# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 12:55 |
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Senso posted:Personally, when I play a windowed game, I want to be able to click elsewhere - it's usually why I play windowed: I'll have a chat window or work windows, etc. That's fair enough. I usually hit alt+tab to get out of a windowed game, personally, but I want to know if other people just instinctively expect to be allowed to just move their cursor out of the game window and click outside. edit: Hey, my program just hit 5,000 lines of code. That's a thing. Mug fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Sep 18, 2012 |
# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 13:27 |
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Red Mike posted:I don't mind it myself, but I've seen people go batshit over anything doing that. Making it an option shouldn't be difficult, I think? I can't really make it an option because I don't use normal mouse control relative to the window. If you move your mouse to the very top left of the playing field and then click, the camera slowly pans over to that patch of grass, and your mouse cursor stays upon that patch of grass, meaning the mouse cursor slowly drifts back towards the center of the window. Because of this, if I let windows take back the mouse cursor, a second flick to the top left of the screen would cause the mouse cursor to fly outside the window way earlier than the user would expect. I tried using SDL's MouseMove to literally move the mouse cursor along the path that the user sees, but that caused the polling speed issues I mentioned before. So I just capture the mouse, lock it to the center of the window and make it invisible but track the mouse movements invisibly and draw a fake cursor on the game window. I'll just have to get playtester opinions when the time comes.
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 14:28 |
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Bongo Bill posted:If you've got a cursor while in menus and some other reason for having a mouse at other times, then capture the mouse when you close the menu and release it when you open it. I'm pretty sure I can do this, so I will. My game is intended to be ran full-screen, but windowed is an option.
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 23:30 |
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Bongo Bill posted:As a rule of thumb, make sure it never takes more than a single keystroke to release the mouse even if you do ever capture it. One feature of the Steam overlay is adding this behavior to all compatible games run in windowed (or, if you've got multiple displays, even fullscreen) mode. Hitting escape will bring up an overlay menu with real, uncaptured mouse that you can move anywhere. Would that be fine?
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 23:44 |
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I've spent the last two days working on the camera and mouse so heavily and I'm really starting to get happy with it. I took a lot of cues from Cannon Fodder along the way. I can't think of any other game in the last 19 years that's used that type of mouse/camera movement and I think I've done a really good job of implementing it. Makes it really easy to click on an object even when the camera is moving.
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# ¿ Sep 19, 2012 12:04 |
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My game people are only like 17x24 or something to that effect in most cases. You can just copy my proportions if you want a general guide and then make them a little larger given your 50x50 canvas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAn455tLSLU I can't really draw very well at all, so I usually just google image search the thing I'm looking for, paste it into photoshop and scale it waaaayyy down to the size I need, and then draw over it with my own little bit of style. That's where my plants and watercoolers came from.
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# ¿ Sep 19, 2012 23:27 |
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Nition posted:I want to put a small game up for sale on my website, but I'm not sure which system to use. Does anyone here have experience with using the different payment systems? I would like to know some info on this one, too. Fastspring looks kinda interesting.
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# ¿ Sep 20, 2012 03:32 |
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DeathBySpoon posted:I guess that's a bad screen- I have 45 and 22.5 degree tiles done in code, but no visuals for them yet. I'll try and get something workable and show how they look. Thanks for the feedback already, I'll look into adding foliage details / etc too. The foliage you have up the top, can you put it down the bottom but make it foreground stuff so your character runs behind it?
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# ¿ Sep 20, 2012 23:32 |
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Nition posted:I'm thinking of just going with no copy protection, but if anyone has actually used a copy protection system in the past, I'd love to hear what you used and how it worked out. I'm working in Unity. Could probably use anything that's C#-based also. Don't try to stop people copying your game. You'll never profit from trying to do that in this environment we're in. Let people go to your site, pay using paypal, send them a special licence key to their email address that they can type in on your site and download your game as many times as they want forever.
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# ¿ Sep 21, 2012 03:02 |
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Literally every attempt you make to stop someone copying your game will have 0 impact on someone who doesn't want to pay for your game, and anything from a "minor inconvenience" to a "extremely pissed off sales impacting" effect on people who would overwise be happy to pay $9.99 for your game.
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# ¿ Sep 21, 2012 03:36 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:30 |
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Oh man I just ran the latest build of my engine on Windows 8 and it just locks up as soon as it tries to play the music. Now I'm worried.
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# ¿ Sep 21, 2012 04:05 |